Alexander Skarsgård Found Those Naked Big Little Lies Scenes To Be “Quite Liberating”
If you’ve watched HBO anytime in the last decade, you’ve invariably been charmed or terrified by Alexander Skarsgård. In fact, the Swedish actor has all but made a career on it, thanks to his breakout role as the irresistible vampire Eric Northman on True Blood and, most recently, starring as Perry Wright, Nicole Kidman’s abusive husband on this year’s breakaway hit miniseries In between, the Stockholm native has starred in a critically acclaimed indie film (2015’s s. In between, the Stockholm native has starred in a critically acclaimed indie film (2015’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl), made a cameo as Adam—to Karlie Kloss’s Eve, no less—in Zoolander 2, and played the titular role in last summer’s The Legend of Tarzan. It’s all certainly a far cry from someone who didn’t want to be in Hollywood in the first place, following a brief, uncomfortable stint as a child actor. “I guess I ended up going back to acting because I was shit at everything else. I tried desperately to figure out what I wanted to do, and I was quite mediocre at most things, so I was like, “Well, maybe this whole acting thing…” It certainly has seemed to have worked out.

Where did you spend most of your childhood?
I grew up in Stockholm, Sweden. My father’s an actor, so we traveled quite a bit when I was a kid. I spent a summer in Texas when I was eight, in Fredericksburg, which is like real Texas. It’s like cowboys and stuff. That was my first time in the States, and I was eight years old. It was also the first time I tasted Dr. Pepper, which blew my mind. And just to be around like horses and cowboys and a desert—we don’t have much of a desert in Sweden, so I thought it was so coo. I got my first real cowboy boots out there, and then I got back to Sweden a couple months later, I proudly wore those boots to school the first day of school. I thought all the girls would love me and like everyone would just faint when they saw those crocodile boots, and instead, everyone mocked me. In Stockholm, people didn’t really quite appreciate cowboy boots. They thought I was wearing women’s shoes, so it didn’t quite go down as I had hoped. It was traumatic. Actually, I haven’t worn cowboy boots since.
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